Reader Spotlight: Michael Kinyon
Today I have the joy of presenting to you an interview with Michael Kinyon, math professor and webcomics überfan. I obviously met Michael thru Twitter, where he is always available with good advice, funny stories and whatnot. He was kind enough to answer a lot of my questions, so this interview is a little long 🙂
D: So you’re listed a professor of mathematics and a webcomics uberfan. Which came first?
M: The former. I started as an assistant professor at Indiana University South Bend back in 1992. Sometime around 1999 (I don’t recall precisely), I discovered the webcomic RPG World by Ian Jones-Quartey. I don’t even know how I discovered it; probably it was just old-fashioned “websurfing” (remember that?)
At the time, RPG World was part of a small webcomics collective called Bag of Chips, through which I discovered Jon Rosenberg’s Goats and Meredith Gran’s Skirting Danger. And those led me to more comics and it all kind of snowballed from there.
Er, I mean the webcomics enthusiasm snowballed from there, not the professoring. That just slowly evolved. I am now a professor at the University of Denver. I’ve been here since 2006.
D: Got any good mathematician jokes, the kind that real mathematicians actually tell?
M: The best collection of these I’ve ever seen is at an old page maintained by Andrej and Elena Cherkaev at my alma mater.
D: I just saw a video claiming that the sum of all positive integers (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + … to infinity) was somehow equal to -1/12, due to some interesting tricks with sums. But it hurts my brain! Is there a simple explanation, or is it math wizardry?
M: Heh! The “proof” you probably saw isn’t exactly rigorous, but it’s very amusing. Assigning meaningful sums to divergent series like that is an old game in mathematics, although somewhat out of fashion now. That particular sum was apparently due to Srinivasa Ramanujan, a fascinating person everyone should know about.
D: I see you went to the U of U. You aren’t going to hate me or refuse an interview if I tell you I went to BYU? 😉
M: We all do things in life we later regret. I guess for you, it was higher education. 😉
I lived in Utah from age 8 to age 28. For me (as a nonMormon), the U of U was a pretty natural choice. The thing I did that was strange was get all my degrees there, not just my undergrad degree. When people ask me now if it’s a good idea to do that, I usually say no, go somewhere else and be exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking.
D: So how did you start becoming a webcomics enthusiast?
M: I was a comics enthusiast first. When I was a kid, I loved Harvey Comics and Archie Comics. When I hit my teens, I discovered DC and Marvel. I was a DC guy all the way through. That was the time when Steve Englehart was doing his epic run as writer for Detective Comics and the Justice League. I never could get much into Marvel at the time; somehow there was too much back story I just couldn’t follow.
But I also remember when I became disenchanted. I was “too cool” to read Harvey Comics anymore (a teenage boy reading Richie Rich?) and I was a little bored with Archie (though even today, I wish I could eat burgers like Jughead did). In the Justice League, toward the end of Englehart’s run, there was the arc where Mark Shaw, a former Manhunter, styles himself as The Privateer, but then Red Tornado exposes him as a criminal. There was this absolutely awful splash page with just the Privateer’s head and tons of confession in text boxes. And I remember how much it took me out of the story and out of the DC world. I no longer cared about
Justice League canon or anything else.
I hung in there for a bit, but subsequent to that, just after Englehart had quit DC, there was an issue of Detective Comics with a new writer and a new artist. It was a one-shot with Batman against the Scarecrow. And it was positively dreadful. At the climax, when Batman actually confronts the Scarecrow, there was, of all things, a beat panel. I kid you not. The Batman crashes in, then a beat panel, and then he says the old cliche “it’s all over, Scarecrow”. And suddenly, I didn’t feel like buying DC comics anymore. All of this is from memory, by the way; I’ll let the pedantic among your readers find the old issue and see if my memory of it is correct.
Anyway, that was the end of me and comic *books* for many years. I was still reading newspaper comics, of course, though I wasn’t particularly taken with any one of them, except for Gary Larsen’s Far Side. (Calvin and Hobbes started later, and I wasn’t even reading newspapers by that point.) And the rest I explained above. I had a moment when I realized “oh my gosh, there are people putting *comics* on the *web*”, and it took off from there.
I was a regular in the Goats Forums (considering how few people use forums anymore, this really dates me). In fact, I’m the one who coined the term “goataku” to describe us. I became online friends with Gary Tyrrell and Jeff Lowrey, other regulars. Gary, as you know, founded Fleen (at Jon Rosenberg’s urging) and still runs it, to the point where he is now one of the most respected webcomic journalists. Jeff was there for a while too, in Fleen’s early days. Little known fact: before Fleen started, Gary invited me to be a regular contributor. Because my work schedule was heavy at the time, I had to say no. I still regret that, in some ways.
In my Twitter profile, I call myself the Webcomics Uberfan (with the umlaut over the U). That was actually Gary’s nickname for me. So I guess the other part of the enthusiasm question is how did I become a D-list Twitter celebrity (meaning: not a celebrity at all) followed by a whole bunch of webcomics people. Well, that was just an accident, as many such things turn out to be. Shortly after I started on Twitter back in 2008, I was just following webcomickers, and I made a very silly tweet that my life’s goal was to be followed by all the webcomics people in the world. I was just kidding, of course, and it was a very stupid joke. But it got retweeted by Jon, who had a sizeable (by 2008 standards) following. And all of a sudden, here came the follows!
When the dust settled, I had thanked everyone personally, and had many more comics to read. And since then, I have always tried to be as supportive as I can be. (With many Followers comes many responsibility. No, wait, that doesn’t sound right….)
D: You have thousands of webcomic creators listed on one of your twitter lists.
M: Right, the lists are the next part of the story, since that’s what I’m known for now. There are two main lists, “webcomics-pals” and “webcomics-folks”. I started those when Twitter created the list feature. I thought it would be a nice idea to create lists of people in webcomics (creators, bloggers, etc.) so that Twitter users could easily find webcomics people. But at the time, there was a limit of 500 people you could follow per list. So I had to partition the webcomickers I was following in some arbitrary way. The first cut I made was people who follow me (the “pals”) and people who don’t (the “folks”). And then the second cut was alphabetical based on username. So for instance, in the old incarnation of the lists, your account @dsharp524 would have been in “webcomics-pals-a-thru-h”.
Later, Twitter dropped the upper limit on lists, so I just merged everything into the two current ones. In way, it’s a little bit silly for me to keep them separate, because it makes people think I care if someone follows me or not, when in reality, it doesn’t matter to me at all. But I’ve had them separate for so long, I just keep them that way out of inertia, I suppose.
I do cull the lists about once per month. If someone hasn’t tweeted in, say, three or four months, I figure they are probably done with Twitter, so I cut them. I add them back if they restart, assuming I notice. I’ve definitely noticed more dropouts in the last year or so. What that says about Twitter isn’t clear.
The “pals” list also has a fair number of people who still follow me and with whom I chat but who have pretty much stopped updating a comic. I don’t have the heart to cut them. They are “pals”, after all.
The third list is “webcomics-characters”, which follows accounts by webcomics characters who tweet. I add new tweeting characters when I find them, but I don’t really cull the lists. I would guess at least half the accounts there are inactive. Creators start these things, but then find they take a lot of time to maintain, time probably better spent actually creating the comic.
The old Follow Friday tradition on Twitter is nowhere near what it was back in Twitter’s early days, but a few people still do it. I no longer do unsolicited ones, because I don’t want to clog people’s timelines, but if someone FF’s me, I will thank them in a shout out with a link to the comic. I like to hope it gives people a few new readers.
D: How many of those comics do you actually read on a regular basis?
M: It’s no secret, but I only read about 100 regularly updating webcomics. I add more as I can, and every day I feel terrible that I cannot read more. But I have a family and a job. It’s easier for me to add ones with small archives. So, to pick a famous example, I know I will never read J. D. Frazer’s User Friendly because its archive is too huge. It’s also easier for me to catch up if I have, say, an e-book of collected strips.
D: What do you, as a webcomic reader, like to see in webcomics?
M: It’s easier to say what I don’t like. I don’t mind a bit of violence, but comics that just pile it on are not for me. Similarly for torture, etc. Some smut is fine, as long as it serves a story. Perhaps the biggest temptation to which a new creator will easily succumb is excessive world-building, followed by excessive exposition. If one of your characters is going to spend the next several weeks describing the customs and by-laws of Floobleland, you have become lost in the world you created and forgot to tell a story. This happens a lot with comic utopias; it’s just too easy to have the residents stand around and tell the outsiders about their perfect society, instead of getting on with the story and having the utopia’s good (from the creator’s point of view) features emerge naturally in the storytelling.
D: What do you wish creators knew?
M: To keep practicing and to keep posting. But I think most do know that. They need to hear it once in a while from more experienced creators, not from me.
D: Where do you think or hope the genre is going?
M: First, a bit of pedantry: webcomics is not a genre. It’s a means of delivering comics, that’s all. Some folks, like Ryan Sohmer, have argued eloquently that “webcomics” itself as a term has no meaning. I don’t quite agree, but I certainly sympathize with the larger point being made, which is that people who create (web)comics are part of the same community as those who draw superheroes for one of the Big Two. Webcomics contains many genres within it, of course.
Anyway, I think that the (inevitable) death of net neutrality means that even fewer indy creators will ever make a living from webcomics, at least from the old advertising-plus-swag model (which may be dying anyway, net nonneutrality or not). We might see a deeper divide between the haves and have-nots because new creators trying to do it all on their own simply won’t be able to get the pageviews. The indy creators who do succeed will be those who have agreements with companies which have some strategy for dealing with this. I don’t know if any indy companies (e.g., Hiveworks) are really ready, though. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
On the other hand, the hobbyists who are just in it for fun will always be around, and so long as that’s the attitude they have toward it without any other expectations, they’ll be fine.
Thanks again Michael for sharing your awesome thoughts 😀 His Twitter links are up at the top if you want to talk to him more. Next week I have an interview with Ethan Kocak, amphibian enthusiast and creator of the webcomic Black Mudpuppy, so make sure to come back and see what he has to say.